With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas.

Russian Misapprehension Peter Hart’s parsing (Extra!, 5/14) of Putin’s “major geopolitical disaster of the century”—the collapse of the Soviet Union—is faulty. Putin did not use either “a” or “the,” as there are no articles in Russian. The “official translation” is of no import. He clearly meant the disaster, not that it was in the top 20. I am not accusing Hart of membership in the Putinform, my neologism for the Stephen Cohens, Robert Parrys, John Pilgers et al. who can’t tell a revolution by masses of fed-up Ukrainians from a “US neocon coup,” and would rather criticize the MSM instead ...

The Reagan Playbook’s Bloody Pages Washington Post columnist David Ignatius (4/8/14) wrote that Russia’s Vladimir Putin may in fact be taking a page out of the United States’ playbook during the Ronald Reagan presidency, when the Soviet empire began to unravel thanks to a relentless US covert-action campaign. Rather than confront Moscow head-on, Reagan nibbled at the edges, by supporting movements that destabilized Russian power in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and, finally, Poland and Eastern Europe. Ignatius credits this idea to a former CIA paramilitary covert-action officer, who argues that what Putin is doing in Ukraine is similar to what he and ...